Oversight is for other people

After months of conceding to demands from a small group of House Republicans for more visibility into continuing investigations, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, pushed back on Tuesday, declaring that the Justice Department “is not going to be extorted.”

His comment came the day after revelations that several of those Republicans, led by Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina and other loyalists of President Trump, had drafted articles of impeachment to use against Mr. Rosenstein in case the long-simmering dispute with the deputy attorney general boiled over.

He's quite full of himself, actually:

Mr. Rosenstein said he had been threatened, though he did not name the Republicans.

“There have been people who have been making threats, privately and publicly, against me for quite some time,” he said. “And I think they should understand by now, the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.”

Uh, Mr. Rosenstein? Congress has an absolute right to demand your cooperation. They have oversight over the Justice Department and they control your budget. If they want something, it's your duty to provide it. It's not extortion. Just so we're clear.

I've seen this idea floating around for a while now, that somehow the Justice Department needs to be independent of the Executive Branch. I would be hard pressed to think of anything that would be worse than having an organization with the power to put people in jail being able to avoid accountability. It's the unstated dream of all the bureaucrats in Washington. It's also what Donald Trump means when he talks about the swamp. And whatever you think about Trump generally, he's 100% correct in his assertions about the nature and general perfidy of the permanent bureaucracy in our nation's capital.